Mohamed Al-Fayed

• 1. Introduction

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  Mohamed Al-Fayed was nineteen years old when he sold bottles of Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria. He had been born in Egypt on the 27th of January 1929. By the end of his life he owned the Hôtel Ritz Paris, the Harrods department store and Fulham Football Club, and Forbes put his fortune at two billion US dollars. From the mid-1960s his home and main business interests were in the United Kingdom.

  How does a street seller become the owner of a famous London store? What did British officials discover when they examined the story he told about his money? Why did a man who loved retail pageantry also spend heavily on lawsuits against newspapers? What did he insist had happened in a Paris tunnel in 1997, and what did a jury decide? And what came to light about his conduct after he died?

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• 2. Deals Abroad

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  By the age of twenty-one Al-Fayed had moved on from soft drinks to selling Singer sewing machines. In 1952 a friend, Tousson El Barrawi, and the seventeen-year-old Adnan Khashoggi hired him for their furniture import business. He excelled there and impressed Adnan's father, Mohamed Kashoggi, who was personal physician to the King of Saudi Arabia. In the early 1950s he also made his first trip to Europe, visiting France, Italy and Switzerland.

  Back in Egypt, Al-Fayed confessed to his wife Samira, Adnan Khashoggi's sister, that he had been unfaithful. She asked for a divorce. He ended his partnership with her brother and quietly withdrew £100,000 from Khashoggi's Al Nasr trading company. Khashoggi issued a writ to recover it. The two men eventually settled by forgiving the money and other debts, in return for Samira's freedom to remarry and return to Egypt.

  President Nasser's threats to seize foreign businesses then created an opening. Al-Fayed took control of a small shipping company owned by Leon Carasso, who wanted to emigrate. Carasso later claimed that the agreed payment was never made. Al-Fayed also picked up stakes in other transport companies at favourable prices. After Nasser ordered Egyptian property confiscated in 1961, Al-Fayed moved ownership of his Middle Eastern Navigation Company to Genoa in Italy.

  On the 12th of June 1964 he arrived in Haiti, then ruled by François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. He travelled on a Kuwaiti passport and introduced himself as Sheikh Mohamed Fayed. Soon after, Duvalier cancelled a ten-year oil monopoly held by a U.S. company and signed a fifty-year contract with Al-Fayed. He also worked with the geologist George de Mohrenschildt. The venture soured six months later, when a sample of supposed crude oil from his Haitian associates turned out to be low-grade molasses.

  Al-Fayed offered to bring Dubai investment to the island if Haiti let him build an oil refinery and develop the wharf at Port-au-Prince. He won exclusive control over the fees for docking, unloading and loading at the main port, which angered Haiti's shipping industry. Duvalier then tapped him for $30,000. Rather than pay, and fearing the shipping agents, he left in December 1964. He later claimed Haiti owed him $2 million. A 1988 report by the Department of Trade and Industry saw it differently: "we have no doubt at all that Mohamed Fayed perpetrated a substantial deceit on the government and people of Haiti in 1964." From Haiti he moved to central London.

  In London, Al-Fayed worked his way into the Arab expatriate community. An Iraqi businessman, Salim Abu Alwan, introduced him to Mahdi Al Tajir, an adviser to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai. Oil was soon to be discovered there. Tajir told Al-Fayed that Dubai was penniless and needed to borrow £1 million for a modern harbour. Al-Fayed found an American lawyer, Imre Rochlitz, who lent £9 million. Rochlitz's Jewish ancestry embarrassed Tajir and later led Rochlitz to reject Al-Fayed's offer of a formal partnership.

  The British engineering firm Costain won the port contract, and Al-Fayed earned a £1.5 million commission. He set up IMS, International Marine Services, in 1968 and brought Bernard Sunley and Sons and Taylor Woodrow to the emirate as well. He also helped arrange finance for the Dubai World Trade Centre, with the banker David Douglas-Home of Morgan Grenfell managing the contract. By the mid-1970s Costain had gained over £280 million of contracts through Al-Fayed and Tajir. He bought 20.84% of its shares and became a director. His commissions paid for a Rolls-Royce, a large chalet in Gstaad and the remaining apartments of 60 Park Lane in Mayfair.

  Dubai's attitude changed in 1993. Mohammed Alabbar, director of the Department of Economic Development, visited Al-Fayed at Harrods. Sheikh Maktoum had appointed him to end the old system of large commission payments. Al-Fayed's contract to manage the World Trade Centre was terminated, and he sued the Maktoums for compensation estimated at between £30 million and £90 million. The case reached court in October 1994, and he was due to testify on the 17th of October.

  That morning his lawyer told the court he was seriously ill with neck and back complications and could not fly to Dubai. Alabbar had secretly taped Al-Fayed on his way to Harrods. The recordings were played in court the next day and showed no sign of illness. Al-Fayed's lawyer told him how disastrous the deception had been for the case.

  A different patron had come earlier. In 1966 Al-Fayed became financial adviser to Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III of Brunei. He later told the writer Maureen Orth that he had known the Sultan's successor, Hassanal Bolkiah, since the future ruler's childhood. In mid-1984 Al-Fayed received powers of attorney and written authorisations from Hassanal Bolkiah, then the richest man in the world. These gave him access to large sums.

  During that period the Royal Bank of Scotland, which banked the three Fayed brothers, received a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Switzerland. The bank assumed the money belonged to the Sultan, but Al-Fayed said his portfolio was separate. The trade department's report called the timing "a very powerful coincidence." In January 1985 Al-Fayed took the Sultan to 10 Downing Street to meet Margaret Thatcher while sterling was falling. The Sultan, who had moved £5 billion of assets out of pounds, moved them back. Al-Fayed claimed credit, and also for persuading the Sultan to give half a billion pounds of contracts to British defence firms.

  Using his power of attorney, Al-Fayed bought the Dorchester Hotel for the Sultan in 1985. He also owned 55 and 60 Park Lane and a building on South Street in Mayfair, and all three were secretly connected to the Dorchester.

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• 3. Rowland And The Takeover

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  In 1974 Al-Fayed met Roland "Tiny" Rowland, chairman of the international conglomerate Lonrho, which had extensive interests in Southern Africa. Their relationship dominated Al-Fayed's life for the next twenty years, with legal fallout lasting into the late 1990s. In March 1975 Rowland persuaded him to swap his Costain shares for 5.5 million Lonrho shares. Al-Fayed used the profit to buy another 3 million Lonrho shares and joined the board.

  He soon grew alarmed. Rowland was using company money to fund his lifestyle and to pay large bribes in Africa, and he was moving profits into a secret Swiss bank account. When the Department of Trade and Industry began investigating Lonrho in early 1976, Al-Fayed quit in May. He sold his Lonrho shares to Kuwaiti investors and bought back his Costain shares for £11 million.

  In 1979 he paid US$30 million for the Ritz hotel in Paris. Lonrho, meanwhile, had been chasing control of the House of Fraser since 1977. That group included Harrods, the Knightsbridge department store. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission blocked Lonrho's attempt in a 1981 ruling. In 1984 Al-Fayed and his brother Ali bought a 30 per cent stake in the group from Rowland for £138 million.

  The trade secretary, John Biffen, then ruled that Lonrho must promise not to buy more House of Fraser shares, which left Rowland "incandescent." Rowland began selling shares to Al-Fayed. Looking back, he said of the man he called Tootsie: "I knew that Tootsie could never afford to purchase the whole of House of Fraser." Al-Fayed demanded that Rowland leave the board and courted the chairman, Roland Smith, who received a retroactive bonus once the takeover was complete. In early 1985 the brothers bought the remaining 70 per cent for £615 million.

  To win approval, the brothers had to convince the government that they had the assets to pay. Their advisers, the investment bankers Kleinwort Benson and the law firm Herbert Smith, submitted a summary of their assets that ran to one and a half pages. The brothers presented themselves as a family of wealthy cotton traders. Kleinwort Benson described an "old established Egyptian family who for more than 100 years were ship owners, land owners and industrialists in Egypt" and put their wealth at "several billion dollars."

  The 1988 trade department report painted a far smaller picture. It said the brothers owned only one luxury hotel. Their oil exploration stakes had no current value. Their banking interests were less than 5 percent of a bank, worth under $10 million. Instead of leading shipowners, they had two roll-on roll-off cargo ferries of 1600 tons each. The inspectors found that by October 1984 the brothers had at least $600 million at their disposal in the Royal Bank of Scotland and a Swiss bank. They were never told where it came from.

  That money apparently served as collateral for a loan of more than £400 million. Al-Fayed explained to Maureen Orth: "If you have a company with tremendous assets like Harrods...you have no problem. You don't need to use cash." The government announced that it would not refer the bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Lonrho, by contrast, had faced three inquiries from that body.

  Rowland wrote to the new trade secretary, Norman Tebbit, rejecting the Al-Fayeds' account of their family wealth. He also enlisted Ashraf Marwan. From 1985 until 1987 he ran a worldwide investigation using accountants, solicitors, private detectives and freelance journalists, at a reported cost of many millions of pounds. Bugging devices were allegedly used, and some money allegedly went to bribe officials who could find documents in Egypt, Haiti, Dubai, Brunei, France and Switzerland. The results went to The Observer, which Lonrho owned.

  Al-Fayed sued The Observer for libel, and other newspapers were routinely threatened with writs. Critical reporting outside The Observer virtually stopped. The trade department inspectors delivered their report in July 1988, but the department declined to publish it. Rowland obtained a copy in 1989, and The Observer printed it in a special free sixteen-page edition. Government lawyers obtained an injunction ordering all copies handed over or pulped. The report was officially published in 1990.

  It concluded that the brothers had dishonestly represented their origins, wealth, business interests and resources to the Secretary of State, the Office of Fair Trading, the House of Fraser board and shareholders, and their own advisers. In 1993 the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the brothers' case against the British government over the report, which they said had ruined their reputation and could not be appealed. Rowland described the feud in his book A Hero from Zero.

  The quarrel did not end with the takeover. In 1998 Rowland, who died that year, accused Al-Fayed of stealing papers and jewels from his Harrods safe deposit box. Al-Fayed was arrested along with the head of Harrods security, John MacNamara, and four other employees, but the charges were dropped. Fayed settled with a payment to Rowland's widow. In 2002 he sued the Metropolitan Police for false arrest and lost. The missing items included rare stamps and a gold cigarette case.

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• 4. Harrods Under Fayed

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  Hugh Fraser's years in charge had left Harrods in steady decline, yet it still produced half of the House of Fraser group's profits. Al-Fayed hired Brian Walsh to manage the group. Walsh created divisions in the company, and more than 200 buyers resigned within two years. After arguments with Al-Fayed, Walsh was fired in October 1987. To calm the staff, Al-Fayed handed out envelopes holding £2,000 in cash each. He then moved his own offices to the fifth floor of Harrods. Walsh's replacement, Michael Ellis-Jones, lasted eight weeks.

  During his 25 years at Harrods, Al-Fayed dressed up as a doorman, a boy scout and Father Christmas. Celebrities were hired to open the annual sale. He commissioned the artist and designer William Mitchell to create an entertaining retail environment, which produced an Egyptian Hall on the ground floor. Its success led to the Egyptian Escalators, which replaced the central lifts. Al-Fayed said he spent more than £400 million restoring the store, and accounts of the escalators' cost range from £20 million to £75 million.

  His love of performance reached television. He appeared on Da Ali G Show in 2000 and the Howard Stern Show in 2007. In 2011 he joined British Celebrity Big Brother and set the housemates a task that involved dressing as ancient Egyptian mummies. In the BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey, in 2007, the character Nessa recounts a sexual relationship with him. Salim Daw played him in seasons 5 and 6 of The Crown.

  In 1990 Christoph Bettermann, who had worked for Al-Fayed in Dubai since 1984, became deputy chairman of Harrods. In April 1991 the Emirate of Sharjah approached him about a job. In June, Bettermann told Maureen Orth, Al-Fayed showed him a written transcript of a phone call between him and a headhunter. Bettermann answered: "If you don't trust me, I resign. I cannot trust you if you bugged my phone." He left for an oil company in Sharjah. Al-Fayed then wrote to Sharjah's ruler accusing him of theft, and three courts in which Al-Fayed had pressed charges cleared Bettermann.

  In 1991 the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee found the Fayeds not "fit and proper" to run the Harrods Bank. It told the Governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, to order control passed to trustees. In 1994 Al-Fayed bought out his brother Saleh's interest in Harrods for £100 million. Before House of Fraser went back on the London Stock Exchange that year, Harrods was moved out of the group so the family kept it privately.

  Inside the store, Al-Fayed worried about staff loyalty. He employed two young Greek women to spy on colleagues, and the phones of the shop workers' union, USDAW, were bugged. Employees were given three-month contracts and were often fired without agreed compensation, which forced them to industrial tribunals. He also secretly recorded conversations about their sex lives.

  Accounts describe him firing staff who offended his sense of aesthetics, and name overweight staff and black people as the most offended-against. Francesca Bettermann, a former legal counsel at Harrods, recalled that the application form asked for a candidate's colour and race. When she objected, Al-Fayed's answer was to make sure applicants supplied proper photographs. The number of black staff at Harrods eventually fell to half the number at other London stores.

  In 1994 Harrods settled five racial-discrimination cases. Trade union officials said that between June and September 1994-23 of the 28 staff dismissed were black, mostly in menial jobs. A florist was rejected because she was black. The tribunal chairman condemned Harrods' defence as "malicious and dishonest," and described "lying and deceit on the part of Harrods personnel to conceal the act of discrimination."

  Harrods had held royal warrants since 1910. The Duke of Edinburgh removed his in January 2000, and Al-Fayed banned him from the store. In December 2000 Al-Fayed took down the others, ahead of their five-yearly review. In August 2010 he wrote to the Daily Telegraph to reveal that he had burnt them. He called the warrants a "curse" and claimed business had tripled since they were gone.

  That same year, in May 2010, after denying the store was for sale, Al-Fayed sold Harrods to Qatar Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, for £1.5 billion. He said he wanted to protect the legacy he had built. He also complained of how hard it was to take his profit, because the trustee of the Harrods pension fund had to approve his dividend. He was named honorary chairman for six months.

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• 5. Politics Press And Passports

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  In 1994 Al-Fayed named MPs whom he had paid to ask questions in Parliament on his behalf, in what became the cash-for-questions affair. The fees had gone undeclared. Conservative MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith left the government in disgrace, and a Committee on Standards in Public Life was set up. Al-Fayed also revealed that the cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had stayed free at the Ritz in Paris at the same time as a group of Saudi arms dealers. Aitken's libel case failed, and he was later jailed for perjury. His spokesman during this period was Michael Cole, a former BBC journalist.

  Hamilton, who has always denied being paid, sued over a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary broadcast on the 16th of January 1997. In it Al-Fayed said the MP had received up to £110,000 in cash and other gratuities. Hamilton lost the libel action in December 1999 and lost his appeal in December 2000. His appeal had argued that the verdict was invalid because Al-Fayed paid £10,000 for documents taken from the dustbins of Hamilton's lawyers by Benjamin Pell.

  Al-Fayed also tried to shape his own story. He invited the writer Tom Bower to write his biography in 1996. Bower's Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography appeared in 1998. Al-Fayed announced a lawsuit and then withdrew it. Bower and Maureen Orth were both targeted for entrapment, with Al-Fayed's staff offering them allegedly stolen documents.

  He moved into publishing and politics too. In 1996 he bought the rights to the old satirical magazine Punch, which had run from 1841 to 1992, and relaunched it for £3 million under the editor Peter McKay. It failed to match Private Eye and folded again in 2002. That year he also founded Liberty Publishing, chaired by the former Evening Standard editor Stewart Steven. Steven offered a £17 million cheque for The Observer, which was refused, as was a later £25 million offer. The company was wound down by his brother Ali after debts of £6.5 million.

  In January 1997 he founded a political organisation called The People's Trust to campaign against a "culture of violence." It was dissolved in September 1998 after failing to file its accounts.

  In early 1993 Mohamed and Ali Al-Fayed applied for British citizenship. Lord Bramall and Jeffrey Archer backed Mohamed's application. It was rejected in December 1993 because the trade department report counted against them. The home secretary, Michael Howard, asked for a review because he feared fresh embarrassment over his links to the alleged fraudster Harry Landy. A second rejection came in February 1995. In 1996 the High Court ruled that the home secretary could not refuse without explanation, and the Home Office dropped its appeal.

  The new Labour home secretary, Jack Straw, granted Ali citizenship in March 1999 but rejected Mohamed in May 1999. The reasons given included Al-Fayed's admission that he had bribed politicians and broken into safety deposit boxes at Harrods. He called the decision "perverse" and described himself as a victim of the British establishment and "zombie" politicians.

  His travel documents had long been complicated. He left Haiti with a Haitian diplomatic passport that he used to enter the United Kingdom in 1964. In 1970 he told Mahdi Al Tajir that the brothers' Haitian diplomatic passports had expired and that Egyptian passports made visas hard to get. Tajir secured Emirati passports, though not Emirati nationality. On his, Al-Fayed changed his birth year from 1929 to 1933. His brothers shaved ten years off their ages. In 1993 the Al Maktoum family refused to renew the passports, so the brothers went back to their Egyptian ones.

  Sometime in the early 1970s he also began adding the prefix al- to his name. In Arabic that prefix, joined to an ancestor's name, means family of or House of. Private Eye mocked the change by calling him the "Phoney Pharaoh." His brothers Ali and Salah copied him during the House of Fraser purchase, though both had backed away from it by the late 1980s. Max Hastings, then editor of the Daily Telegraph, said the paper refused to be threatened over the style and likened it to a Frenchman calling himself de Fayed.

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• 6. Pitch Highlands And Charity

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  Al-Fayed paid £6.75 million for Fulham F.C. in 1997, with the purchase made through Bill Muddyman's Muddyman Group. He set himself the aim of reaching the Premier League within five years. In the 2000-01 season Fulham won the First Division under the manager Jean Tigana, with 101 points and 90 goals. That promotion came a year ahead of schedule. By 2002 the club was in Europe, having won the Intertoto Cup and entered the UEFA Cup. In 2010 Fulham reached the Europa League final and lost to Atletico Madrid.

  The relationship with his manager turned sour. Al-Fayed wrongly alleged that Tigana had overpaid by more than £7 million for new players and negotiated transfers in secret. Fulham lost the legal case that followed in 2004. In 2009 Al-Fayed said he favoured a wage cap for footballers and called the leaders of the Football Association and Premier League "run by donkeys who don't understand business, who are dazzled by money."

  While Craven Cottage was upgraded to modern safety standards, Fulham left the ground temporarily. Fans feared the club would not return, because Al-Fayed had sold a property developer the first right to build on the site. In April 2011 he unveiled a statue of Michael Jackson at the ground. Jackson had attended a league game against Wigan Athletic there in 1999. When fans criticised it, Al-Fayed said anyone who did not appreciate the gift could "go to hell."

  The club's new owners took the statue down in 2013, and Al-Fayed blamed Fulham's relegation on the bad luck its removal brought. He gave it to the National Football Museum, which took it out in March 2019 after the documentary Leaving Neverland. The museum said it had planned for several months to show exhibits that better represent football. Fulham was owned through Mafco Holdings in Bermuda, itself owned by Al-Fayed and his family. By 2011 he had lent the club £187 million in interest-free loans. He sold it to Shahid Khan, owner of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, in July 2013.

  In 1972 Al-Fayed bought the Balnagown estate in Easter Ross, in northern Scotland. It began at 4.8 hectares, and he grew it to 26300 hectares. He spent more than £20 million, restored the pink 14th-century Balnagown Castle and built a tourist accommodation business. In 2002 the Highlands of Scotland tourist board gave him the Freedom of the Scottish Highlands for his efforts to promote the area.

  His Egyptian roots led him to fund a 2008 reprint of Walter Bower's 15th-century Scotichronicon. That chronicle tells of Scota, a daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh, who fled her family and landed in Scotland with the Stone of Scone. Scotland was supposedly named for her, though modern historians dispute the tale. Al-Fayed declared: "The Scots are originally Egyptians and that's the truth." In 2009 he backed Scottish independence and told Scots: "when you Scots regain your freedom, I am ready to be your president."

  In 1987 he set up the Al Fayed Charitable Foundation to help children with life-limiting conditions and children living in poverty. It works with hospices and charities in the UK, Thailand and Mongolia, including Francis House Hospice in Manchester, Great Ormond Street Hospital and ChildLine. In September 1997 West Heath School in Sevenoaks, the former school of Diana, Princess of Wales, went into receivership. Al-Fayed bought it for £2.5 million in May 1998, and it reopened that September as The New School at West Heath, home to the Beth Marie Centre for Traumatised Children. In 2011 his daughter Camilla, an ambassador for the charity for eight years, opened the refurbished Zoe's Place baby hospice in West Derby, Liverpool.

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• 7. The Paris Tunnel

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  In July 1986 Al-Fayed and his son Dodi, born during his marriage to Samira, first met Charles and Diana at a polo tournament sponsored by Harrods. Diana had married Charles, then heir to the throne, in 1981. She was a frequent visitor to Harrods through the 1980s. They divorced in 1996. In mid-1997 Al-Fayed hosted her in the south of France with her sons, Princes William and Harry, and bought a 195-foot yacht, the Jonikal, for the holiday.

  Dodi and Diana then began a private cruise on the Jonikal, and paparazzi photographs of the couple embracing were published. Her friend, the journalist Richard Kay, said she was in her first serious romance since the divorce. They took a second cruise in the third week of August and returned from Sardinia to Paris on the 30th of August. That evening press behaviour made them cancel a restaurant reservation, so they dined privately at the Ritz.

  They planned to spend the night at Dodi's apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. A decoy car left the front of the hotel to mislead photographers while the couple left from the rear in a Mercedes-Benz S280 driven by the concierge, Henri Paul. Five minutes later it crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. Dodi and Paul were found dead there, and Diana died later in hospital. The British bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who suffered a serious head injury, was the only survivor. Al-Fayed reached Paris a day later and viewed Dodi's body, which was returned to the United Kingdom for an Islamic funeral.

  From February 1998 Al-Fayed maintained the crash was the result of a conspiracy. Later he said MI6 had orchestrated it on the instructions of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. A French judicial investigation dismissed his claims, and he appealed. Operation Paget, a Metropolitan Police inquiry that ended in 2006, found no evidence of a conspiracy either. Al-Fayed made 175 conspiracy claims to that inquiry.

  An inquest led by Lord Justice Scott Baker opened at the Royal Courts of Justice on the 2nd of October 2007 and ran six months. It continued the original inquest begun in 2004. Al-Fayed accused the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and her sister, and many others of plotting Diana's death. Their motive, he claimed, was that they could not accept her marrying a Muslim.

  He had first told the Daily Express in May 2001 that Diana was pregnant and that he was the only person she had told. Witnesses who said she was not pregnant, and could not have been, were part of the plot in his telling. The press roundly condemned his testimony as farcical. Members of the Intelligence and Security Committee accused him of turning the inquest into a "circus."

  On the 14th of February 2008 his investigator of five years, John MacNamara, a former senior Scotland Yard detective, admitted he had no evidence of foul play beyond Al-Fayed's own assertions. Al-Fayed's lawyers also accepted that nothing showed Diana was illegally embalmed to hide a pregnancy, and nothing showed French emergency services played a role in any plot. They conceded there was no direct evidence that the Duke of Edinburgh or MI6 had taken part.

  On the 7th of April 2008 the jury found that Diana and Dodi were "unlawfully killed" through the grossly negligent driving of Henri Paul, who was drunk, and of the pursuing vehicles. Al-Fayed said he would drop his campaign and accept the verdict. The journalist Dominic Lawson wrote in The Independent that Al-Fayed had tried to concoct a cover-up story around a crash involving an intoxicated driver who worked at his Paris Ritz. Lawson said he had persuaded parts of the tabloid press, notably the Daily Express, to give the idea a fair wind.

  In 2011 Al-Fayed financed Unlawful Killing, a documentary directed by Keith Allen that presented his version of events. It was never formally released because of the risk of libel suits. Its final scene showed film of the burning of the Harrods royal warrants.

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• 8. After His Death

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  Al-Fayed died in London on the 30th of August 2023, aged 94, on the same calendar day as the Paris crash. His cause of death was listed as old age, and the news was announced on the 1st of September. He was buried that day at Barrow Green Court alongside Dodi, after a funeral service during Friday prayers at London Central Mosque.

  The accusations that followed his death had a long history. In 1985 he had married the Finnish socialite and former model Heini Wathén, and they had four children, including Omar. Meanwhile, as long ago as 1995, Maureen Orth's Vanity Fair profile "Holy War at Harrods" had quoted former employees saying he walked the store looking for young, attractive women for his office. They said those who rebuffed him faced crude, humiliating comments, and that he sometimes tried to stuff money down women's blouses. Al-Fayed sued the magazine. The case ended in a settlement with no damages paid, but with all the evidence placed in locked storage. Vanity Fair settled partly out of sympathy for Diana's fatal crash.

  Reports also describe young women applying for Harrods jobs often being subjected to HIV tests and gynaecological examinations. In December 1997 the ITV programme The Big Story broadcast former employees describing routine sexual harassment. In October 2008 Al-Fayed was interviewed under caution by the Metropolitan Police over an allegation of sexual assault against a 15-year-old schoolgirl. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case because conflicting statements left no realistic chance of conviction.

  In December 2017 an episode of Channel 4's Dispatches alleged that he had sexually harassed three female Harrods employees and tried to groom them. One was 17 at the time. Cheska Hill-Wood gave up her anonymity for the programme. It alleged that he targeted young employees over a 13-year period. Scrutiny had been limited by his frequent threats of litigation and by the reputation he built for spending large sums suing news organisations. It was also attributed to his security chief, John MacNamara, who allegedly threatened and watched potential witnesses and victims.

  In September 2024 BBC News reported that more than 20 women who had worked at Harrods alleged that Al-Fayed sexually assaulted them, and five accused him of rape. Gaute Haugenes, a former manager of the women's club Fulham L.F.C., said players were never left alone with him, and staff knew he "liked young, blonde girls." BBC Two broadcast the documentary Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods, which explored evidence that Harrods failed to investigate and a possible cover-up.

  On the 21st of September 2024 the barrister Dean Armstrong KC said he had 37 clients and had been contacted by 150 people. On the 26th of September the Metropolitan Police said they would examine whether anyone else should face criminal charges. The same day, Harrods' managing director Michael Ward said Al-Fayed had "presided over a toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation, fear of repercussion and sexual misconduct." By then around 200 former employees had spoken to investigators. Allegations also emerged about his years owning Fulham between 1997 and 2013, and by the 27th of September lawyers were working with 60 women.

  On the 11th of October the Metropolitan Police revealed 40 new allegations from 40 different people, covering the period from 1979 to 2013. On the 18th of October the former Fulham Ladies captain Ronnie Gibbons said he had groped her twice and tried to kiss her forcefully in his private office at Harrods in 2000, when she was 20. By the 21st of October Harrods was settling more than 250 compensation claims. By the 31st, 400 alleged victims or witnesses had approached lawyers. A lawyer for the Justice for Harrods Survivors group called it "the worst case of corporate abuse of women the world has ever seen." Some women also alleged abuse by his brother Salah, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010.

  In November 2024 it emerged that the Metropolitan Police had been told of such allegations ten years earlier than they acknowledged. They had said the first reports arrived in 2005. In 1995, however, Samantha Ramsay, who has since died, had complained. Her family said the force dismissed her. Her sister Emma recalled being told: "We've added it to a pile of other female names that we've got that have made the same complaint against Mohamed Al Fayed." The force said some 1995 reports were paper-based and might not have been transferred. By the end of November the inquiry covered alleged offences from 1977 to 2014, with the youngest victim aged 13. Police were also investigating more than five people they believed may have helped enable his offending.

  His son Omar said he was "horrified" and that the claims had "thrown into question the loving memory" he had of his father. He expressed sorrow for the victims and said they and the public deserved full transparency and accountability.

  On the 13th of August 2025 the BBC reported that 146 women and men had come forward in the police investigation, double the October 2024 figure. Harrods, now under new ownership, has offered victims compensation of up to £385,000 and a formal apology.

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